I'm planning to visit a few places in Egypt during the month of January or February. The locations on my itinerary are:

Cairo

Alexandria

Aswan

Abu Simbel

Luxor

I plan to spend anywhere from 1 to 2 days at those locations. Is it culturally acceptable for a male to wear shorts, tshirts and flip flops? What's the temperature like at this time of the year? Will I need a sweater? Are hiking boots required or just the general walking shoes? My tour will not include hiking for more than 1 hour.

2 Answers
2

All of those places are touristy, and as such they're completely used to seeing tourists wearing all of the described clothing.

One thing to note, however, is if you're taking the train down to Aswan/Luxor overnight, it can get rather chilly in the desert at which point you will most certainly want more than just t-shirts and shorts. In fact I had my sleeping bag on as our airconditioning was stuck on freezing all night, but hopefully that's rare ;)

In general most of our group had long shorts and t-shirts, although the women would put a shawl on occasionally, and certainly when entering religious sites like the Mosque in Cairo, it's advisable that you will need to be more covered up than that - no bare shoulders, no shorts, etc.

the Mohamed Ali mosque in Cario will 'sort you out' clothing for woman for a small fee if you don't meet there dress requirements. However you may not want to be photographed in clothing that wouldn't look out of place at a clan rally. Tall pointy white hood with long robe...
– StuartNov 9 '11 at 12:25

For men, the only place you have to worry about what you are wearing is inside a mosque, other than that you can wear whatever you want to. This does not apply to women, though.

However in January or February I think it is going to be a little cold for shorts, t-shirts and flip flops.
In Aswan, Abo Simbel and Luxor it's only at night when it gets cold just as any desert, which can be very cold sometimes, but the rest of the day you're fine with a t-shirt.
Cairo may be a very little bit warm a few hours a day and Alexandria has crazy weather that changes every hour with wet conditions and low temperature.

Anyway here are the average temperatures for the cities you are visiting:

Cairo

January(Lo/Hi): 8-18c / February: 9-20c

Alexandria

January: 7-17c / February: 8-18c

Aswan

January: 7-24c / February: 9-26c

Luxor

January: 5-23c / February: 6-25c

Abo Simbel

January: 8-23c / February: 9-23c

And these are just average temperatures inside the cities, as soon as you are at the edge of any city you can feel the temperature drop to much lower as you go more into the desert.
only 50km away from down town Cairo (Cairo is Huge) the temperature was 3c at 2 am. while as soon as I entered Cairo the temperature was 18c at 2:25 am.

and I’ve noticed an increase in extreme conditions, the weather doesn’t match with forecasts as it used to. sometimes it changes suddenly high or low, and in multiple recent occasions it rained ice in Cairo and Alexandria while the temperature in Cairo was 17c, I don’t know whether to call it a Hail storm or not because there wasn’t any storm, just big chunks of ice falling from the sky.
Also rain at strange times of the year and much more than used to.